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Books Quotes
"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."
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"Nowadays I construct my books as if they're film scripts."
1
"There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do."
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"My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected."
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"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."
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"I have personally seen statements that were longer than some books I have read."
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"Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost."
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"It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks."
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"Even a book with completely empty pages will change you because you will start thinking about the reason behind this emptiness and once you enter the thinking territory it means that you entered a territory of change!"
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"I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them."
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"There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite."
1
"It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do."
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"I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece."
1
"I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers."
1
"A bad book with a good cover is nothing but a wooden house with a golden door."
1
"We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions."
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"Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction."
"What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so."
"Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything."
"Our library isn't very extensive," said Anne, "but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph."
"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
"Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try."
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
"When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask."
"I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair."
"Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away."
"There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books."
"The true university of these days is a collection of books."
"Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?"
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